Cash Bonanza

Storyline

Each episode features 15 contestants selected from a pool of winners of a lottery scratch card game. Near the beginning of each episode, the 15 selected contestants are seen riding the splash drop on the Wild Wild West adventure ride at Warner Bros. Movie World, where the series was filmed. The contestants are allocated numbers from 1 to 15, which appear on the cowboy hats that they wear, and assigned into teams of different colours based on their number - numbers 1 to 5 are in the Red Team, numbers 6 to 10 are in the Blue Team and numbers 11 to 15 are in the Yellow Team. The studio audience are divided into the three colours based on which team is in front of them, and at the end of each game, the audience section whose player wins the game receives $2,000 cash. Each contestant has a chance to play one of three games to win up to $5,000, with the runners up in each game receiving $500 regardless of what they won in the game. Each game is played by a different contestant, so 9 of the 15 contestants in each episode get to play a game. If a contestant wins less than $5,000, then the rest of the money is given to a home viewer drawn at random from the winners of another part of the lottery scratch card game, so if a contestant wins $4,000, then the other $1,000 is won by the home viewer. At the start of each of the first three games, contestants are selected by a device known as the Front Loading Instant Nugget Gun, or FLING for short. FLING fires three spherical nuggets, one red, one blue and one yellow. The numbers on the nuggets fired (1-5 on the red, 6-10 on the blue and 11-15 on the yellow) indicate the three contestants who will compete in the game. The first game is Gold Diggers Derby. Three amounts, $2,500, $4,000 and $5,000, are placed at the entrances of a gold mine five spaces ahead of where the contestants start, and are then shuffled at random by the Lotteries computer. Contestants take turns to select numbers from 1 to 15 from a board, and each number will reveal a mine cart that is coloured either blue, yellow or red, with each colour appearing on the board five times. The colour that is revealed determines which contestant's cart gets to move one space forward. After a colour has been revealed four times, a siren will sound to indicate that the contestant is one space away from the entrance, and that contestant can then decide whether or not they want the amounts at the entrances to be shuffled. The first contestant to reach the entrance by having all five carts of their colour revealed wins the amount of money in front of their entrance at the time of their final move. The second game is Double Quick-Draw, a three-player variation of the classic game of Rock Paper Scissors. In each of eight rounds, the three players have to choose one of those three items, and after they make their selections, the audience count "one, two, three" and the contestants press their plungers to reveal their choice on a screen behind them. The money on offer in the eight rounds is $20, $40, $80, $150, $300, $600, $1,000 and $2,000. If two players make a winning choice, like two Papers wrapping a Rock, each player wins the amount of money offered in the round. If one player makes a winning choice, like one Scissors cutting two Papers, they receive double the specified amount, effectively winning it from both of the other contestants. If each player makes a different selection or they all choose the same item, then it is a stalemate and the money offered in that round jackpots to the next round. At the end of the eight rounds, the contestant with the most money wins what they earned, with these winnings capped at $5,000 if they won more. If the last round ends in a stalemate, then additional rounds are played for the money offered in the final round plus any carried-over jackpots until a winner is found. The third game is Drop The Silver Dollar. The three contestants take turns dropping a coin into a large pachinko machine with several moving and turning parts that will send it into one of five cash buckets at the bottom. In the first round, $60 will appear in two buckets and $200, $500 and $1,000 in one bucket each, with the computer randomly placing the amounts into different buckets for each contestant. The amounts in each bucket are only revealed after the coin's drop has been started. The amount of money in the bucket where the coin lands is added to that contestant's total. In the second round the money increases, with $1,000 and $1,500 appearing in two buckets each, but one of the buckets is a Half Stake, which reduces the contestant's winnings if the coin falls there. For the third round, the cash amounts are increased further, but a second Half Stake bucket is added alongside two buckets of $2,000 and one bucket of $2,500. After three rounds, the contestant who has the most money is offered one final drop in which the buckets are all marked with WIN or LOSE, with the computer providing a 50:50 chance of 3 WIN and 2 LOSE or 2 WIN and 3 LOSE buckets appearing. As before, the buckets' contents are only revealed after the coin drop begins. If the contestant accepts the offer and drops their coin into a WIN bucket, they will win $5,000, but if their coin falls into a LOSE bucket, the other contestant with more money wins what they earned. If the contestant who earned the most money chooses to pass, then the contestant with the next highest winnings to that point is offered the chance to take the final drop. The final game is played by the contestant from the three previous games who won the most money. If two or three contestants are tied with the equal highest winnings, a scenario most likely when the amount won by each is $5,000, a tie-breaker game is played where each tied contestant picks a plunger and in turn pushes their plunger handle down. Only one of the plungers will set off an explosion, and the contestant who picks it wins their way into the final game. The winning contestant goes head to head against a home viewer, called by telephone after being selected at random from people who have registered by calling a number with their Cash Bonanza lottery ticket. The final game, which has a cash prize of $100,000 guaranteed to be won by either the studio contestant or the home viewer, is played on a board of twelve screens, each containing a celebrity face. To decide who plays first, the studio contestant picks one celebrity, and a short video is played in which the chosen celebrity says who will go first. Six of the celebrities will say that the studio contestant will go first if they are picked, the other six will say that the home viewer will go first if they are selected. The contestant who goes first then chooses one of the celebrities and another video clip of their chosen celebrity is played. This time, one celebrity will have a cheque for $100,000, another will have a stick of dynamite, and the other ten will each have $500 to go to the contestant that picks them. The two contestants then continue to take alternating turns at choosing celebrities until one of them finds the dynamite or the $100,000 cheque. If a contestant finds the dynamite, they lose the money they have earned to that point of the game and the other contestant wins $100,000, while if a contestant finds the celebrity with the cheque, they win $100,000 and the other contestant gets to keep whatever money they have earned to that point. If the studio contestant wins, the home viewer will receive a trip to the Gold Coast as a consolation prize, with a return Qantas flight, 5 days at Sea World Nara Resort, all transfers and entry to Sea World, Warner Bros. Movie World and Wet 'n' Wild included.